How to optimize your ad campaigns for consumer behavior on Facebook and Google

Facebook now accounts for 65% of total social network ad spend and is expected to reach $36 billion in 2017, while Google saw a 17% increase in revenues from 2014 to 2015.

These are now the go-to channels for marketers wishing to attract users and user attention, with businesses putting aside huge budgets to reach audiences on these platforms.

Facebook and Google have also both influenced how users search for information online and respond to advertising, in ways that marketers need to be aware of and adapt to in order for their advertising campaigns to be a success.

Both channels are powerful in their own, unique ways, but both also have their problems.

How can marketers overcome these challenges and optimize their campaigns for the twin giants of Google and Facebook?

Facebook

We all know that Facebook is growing at an amazing speed, with 1.28 billion people logging on for an average of 35 minutes every day (Mediakix, 2016). Clearly, this platform has monopolized users’ free time, so there is now no better way for marketers to target potential customers as they go about their everyday activities.

However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

When someone uses a search engine, such as Google, they are looking for what they are interested in – giving marketers some idea of who and what they should target.

But there is slightly more guesswork involved with Facebook ads, with marketers needing to ensure that they are pushing relevant content onto consumer’s feeds, to avoid it getting lost in the mass of content that is already on the platform.

The solution?

On Facebook, people share almost every conceivable detail of their lives. Harnessing this data to create personalized and targeted ads is the key to taking advantage of the Facebook boom – and to delivering the right content, to the right individuals, on a platform they are already browsing.

Marketers can even go a step further – combining all known information about consumers, including that found outside Facebook, like website visits and previous purchase history, to create even more targeted content.

The more granular and rich your incoming data, the better your Facebook ads will be, and the more likely they will lead to conversions.

Google

Google now processes an average of over 40,000 search queries every second – translating to over 3.5 billion searches per day. This number is huge, and when you consider the fact that every single one of those searches is a user looking for something to meet a specific need, you understand why keyword bidding is such a powerful tool for marketers.

As we mentioned earlier, one of the beauties of Google is that when a person searches for something related to your brand, you can be pretty certain that they are interested. But with this specificity comes greater competition from businesses wishing to capitalise on these potential customers.

Indeed, whilst the average CPC for Facebook Ads in the US was $0.28 in Q3 of 2016, Google AdWords was costing businesses a whopping 88% more, at a search average of $2.32 (AdEspresso, 2017; WordStream, 2017). Marketers need to ensure that they don’t get so caught up in the appeal – and ease – of AdWords bidding, that they spend huge budgets for little outcome.

The solution?

Invest in artificial intelligence and machine learning, so that your bids are automated according to how potential customers are responding at any given moment. Marketers can only adapt so quickly, but by optimizing and automating your keyword bidding in this way, you can ensure you do not over, or underspend, your budget.

So, is there a winner?

Clearly, each channel offers something that the other cannot – meaning that marketers shouldn’t really have to choose between one or the other when planning a digital campaign. The important thing is being able to overcome their pitfalls, in order to increase ROI and customer conversions.

We’ve found that the best way is to take advantage of your customer data, in order to deliver personalized and targeted content across your channels.